It is a two-channel video and accompanying publication that attempts an abolitionist imagining, asking the viewer to envision “cages as ruins,”[31] considering the scheduled closure of New York City’s Rikers Island as its starting point.
Interviews with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Shana Agid, Dalaeja Foreman, Sophia Gurulé, Pilar Maschi and other members of New York’s former No New Jails Coalition, provide soundtrack to the wandering of Hunt’s camera through wild sections of the shorelines that surround Rikers, observing plants, trees, wildlife and industrial remains.
These passages are interrupted by sequences with narration performed by artist, Alia Ali, over archival film and collections of stereographic photographs that capture the time of Rikers’ beginnings, addressing its namesake’s involvement in the slave trade and the island’s expansion by vast landfills of ash — burnt garbage brought from New York’s 19th century modern life, upon which the jail complex sits today.
In this way, Hunt treats as malleable the conditions of oppression that oftentimes feel permanent, and leans into a distant, yet fixed indeterminacy that promises celebratory emancipation.”[33] Degrees of Visibility is a large body of landscape photographs made in locations throughout the fifty U.S. states and territories, documenting the spaces in which prisons, jails and detention centers are embedded.
[42][25] The performance built upon the material Hunt originally incorporated into the short video, “I Won’t Drown on that Levee and You Ain’t Gonna’ Break My Back” (2006), which was the centerpiece for the Campaign for Amnesty for Prisoners of Katrina.
[45] It includes the voices of Xochitl Bervera, Joe Cook, Althea Francois, Tamika Middleton, and Malik Rahim, from organizations including Common Ground, Critical Resistance, Friends and Families of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, Human Rights Watch, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, and American Civil Liberties Union of New Orleans.
The film offered a significant critique of the prison industrial complex that followed the activism galvanized by the first Critical Resistance conference in Berkeley in 1998, and it was both made in dialogue with activist organizations and toured alongside campaigns as a grassroots tool.
Made to accompany Hunt's 2001 Corrections and incorporating the additional research that came from that project, they exist as an unlimited edition of free prints, often reprinted for exhibitions and community organizing contexts.